Dr. Paul Zingg opened and closed Chico’s Community Action Summit with an assertion. At the start of the day, he said that the summit was about “virtues.” At the end, he said that he was pleased to hear the issue of wellness receive so much attention. “But,” he added, “we must add goodness to wellness.”

The distinction goes to the core of the summit’s focus: our city’s problem with alcohol.

Wellness is good health, both physically and emotionally. As a culture, we are comfortable talking about this category. We spend vast sums of money on fitness, dieting, and medicine. We analyze many problems like alcohol abuse as public health issues. If people were educated about wellness, we think, they would make better decisions.

It’s a useful model.

But wellness is not the same as goodness. Goodness is the result of the moral disciplines that Dr. Zingg called virtues. The very term goodness calls us to discriminate between actions — that is, to discover which ones might be evil. We are less comfortable with this category.

During the summit, the need for clarity about goodness came up repeatedly.

A session on sexual assault was attended by many survivors of violent crimes, both men and women. Several young women identified themselves as survivors of rape, describing an atmosphere on campus in which men laugh about sexual assault, stalking is a constant reality, and the most dangerous spaces are not public but private. One male student described being beaten in front of cheering bystanders. A father told of an attack on his son. Alumni in the group said that the atmosphere has not changed since they were students years ago.

Survivors of actions like these do not need evil explained. They want change for the good.

Assault survivors talked about creating a culture of personal responsibility by focusing on daily actions and relationships. Associated Students president Jay Virdee also raised the issue of personal responsibility and ran a session exploring educational approaches. He is articulate and passionate about this priority, and has ideas to encourage good decision-making through student mentoring.

I attended a session in which bar owners described being swamped with fake driver’s licenses, either forged or stolen. They conferred with a police officer, cordially but inconclusively. Does the city have resources to arrest and prosecute the people who make and use fake cards? Clearly not. I was struck by the diligence bar owners and managers have shown in enforcing the laws. They are the people who confiscate fake i.d. from a parent trying to pass his kid off as 21. Personal responsibility came up in this discussion as well.

Clearly we need to change individuals’ decision-making. Is wellness a strong enough category to bring about that change?

The parent sneaking liquor into his daughter’s dorm room has a sense of wellness. If he thought it would hurt his daughter to drink, he wouldn’t get her the stuff. If anything, his sense of wellness is offended by what he sees as intrusive rules.

The 19-year-old who uses his older brother’s i.d. to get into bars has a sense of wellness, too. His partying is under control. He gets good grades and holds down a job. He’s not on crack. Who gets hurt?

The 26-year-old who gets a 19-year-old woman to “sext” him when she’s drunk, and later posts her pictures on the web  – even he has a sense of wellness. How could his actions possibly have hurt her? She’s famous now. Guys love her.

On what basis will we argue that these three people are not well? They don’t see the harm in their choices. They don’t see any connection between their actions and nights of mayhem like last Saturday, when the police received 391 calls in a twelve hour period. These three will say it’s other people who are “out of control.”

To make the case, we will have to use the word wrong. We will have to talk about what is good. We’ll have to examine beliefs — critically evaluate the reasons we give for our actions. We’ll have to speak in terms of goodness because wellness is not a self-evident concept. It is derived from ethics.

There are several things we can do to make this case. We can recover some old words that express the differences between actions: honesty and lying, wisdom and folly, lust and love. We can also restore to educators the mandate to teach these words. Even further, we can link consequences to good and bad actions. These are the things that confident communities do.

As a pastor, my job goes one step further. The gospel I teach has to go beyond wellness. Jesus is indeed a healer. But he did not die and rise again because of our poor decisions. He died and rose again because we are not good. He came to deliver us from evil. Only that message is worth calling “good news.”

Kyle Wiley Pickett, music director of the North State Symphony (NSS), has built large audiences while programming new music. The NSS has played pieces by regional composers such as CSU Chico’s Russell Burnham and Simpson University’s Dan Pinkston, as well as Lowell Lieberman, who is nationally known. On November 10-11, the symphony performed Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (1935), a classic twelve-tone work, with NSS concertmaster Terrie Baune.

As a member of the first violin section, I was eager to experience the piece from the inside. I was also interested to gauge audience responses, and to consider what kind of spirituality Berg’s work expresses.

In February, 1935, the American violinist Louis Krasner appealed to Berg to produce a work that would show the beauty of twelve-tone music using a concerto form that audiences would readily appreciate.[1] Berg took the commission two months later after the death of 18-year-old Manon Gropius, the daughter of architect Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler, widow of the famous composer. Berg adored the girl, and composed the Concerto in less than four months around the theme of death and loss, inscribing the score, “To the Memory of an Angel.”

The piece rises to Krasner’s challenge in several ways.

It makes dramatic quotations of two tonal melodies, a Carinthian folk song and a chorale by Johann Sebastian Bach. The quotations give reference points for the listener to understand, and to some extent organize, the music he or she hears. They also have strong symbolism, the Carinthian tune conjuring the image of Manon dancing, and the chorale (“It is Enough” from Cantata No. 60) expressing the desire to leave this painful life for the bliss of the next.

The melodies, however, are not mere bones thrown to the audience. Berg assimilates their tonal harmonizations with his twelve-tone row, so that they emerge from his atonal world in a manner that is both musically organic and emotionally devastating. Bach’s tune in particular, with its unusual opening of three whole tones, is an ingenious development of the last pitch classes of Berg’s row.

In this way, Berg brings an audience into his concerto with feats of structural integrity, and his success was affirmed by the warm responses of audiences in Chico and Redding. Terrie earned the ovations not just with technical agility, but with the romantic sensibility she brought to the work. Her sure and beautiful sound production and her astounding intonation gave the performances a confidence that was essential to winning the audiences. She deployed her skills in advocacy of this piece when she might have played a more beloved concerto and garnered even louder applause. Terrie and Kyle are showing our region what it means to have high artistic skill and character.

A serial work has to win over orchestra players before it can reach listeners. Berg’s orchestration is important in this regard.

Even in great tonal works, players often struggle against a composer’s assignment of parts and dynamics, laboring to overcome thick textures or compete with stronger sections of the orchestra. So when a composer orchestrates fluently, the musicians’ work is rewarded. Players simply have to place their notes accurately to realize the composer’s design. They can then spend their time polishing instead of struggling.

Berg is one of these fluent orchestrators, especially considering the technical challenges of twelve-tone music. A basic problem is the equality of each pitch class. Lacking the tonal center of the diatonic scale, which orders seven pitch classes into a strong hierarchy, the row does not allow the listener a sonic home. A serial work’s organization is not even open to players without careful analysis. The main and secondary ideas are actually marked in the scores of serial pieces, so that players will have some understanding of their parts.

From the first bars, Berg’s elegant orchestration clarifies the Concerto’s motifs, structure, and harmony for players and listeners alike. He aligns timbres and overtones in a quintessentially Viennese manner, and also contrasts sections of the orchestra dramatically without drowning the weaker instruments.

This concerto should be recognized as an artistically important marker for modernist spirituality.

Behind the memorial to Manon Gropius lie Berg’s more complicated personal stories. He was a believer in numerology, avidly following the schemes astrological determinism that fascinated many Viennese artists, and encoding secret messages into his compositions.[2] The 10-bar phrase structure of the opening, for example, symbolizes Berg’s mistress Hannah Fuchs. In the concerto’s passages expressing death throes, the violin cries out Berg’s initials along with Hannah’s, filling the Bach chorale that follows with longing for eternal union, not with Christ, but with a lover. The Carinthian song has a double-meaning, recalling a daughter Berg fathered by a family servant as a young man but never knew. Berg lost two young girls.

Berg’s concerto is a mature work of post-Christian culture, a work already nearly 80 years old. In this modernism, the artifacts of Christian hope become malleable symbols, as all cultural artifacts must, expressing the most subjective longings, and consecrating erotic experience as holy ground. Part of what makes this work a classic is its perfect capture of modernist spirituality: the sexual self under the stars.

Reblogged from Grace Brethren Church of Chico:

One of the visual abstractions we noticed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was his evocation of famous paintings. We saw that his shot of Madeleine floating in the Bay alludes to the painting of Ophelia by Millais, and that references like this give an unconscious emotional atmosphere to the film.

Bernard Herrmann uses a similar abstraction in Vertigo‘s score. He refers to musical forms in a way that intensifies the cultural and psychological atmosphere. Two such references are important to the score’s role as co-narrator with the camera.

First, Herrmann employs a habanera rhythm in relation to Carlotta. The habanera was a Cuban dance that made its way to Spain in the 19^th century, and thence to Europe, becoming famous through Georges Bizet’s Carmen. As a cultural artifact, the dance is associated not just with Hispanic atmosphere but also with seduction.

Second, Herrmann uses ecclesiastical forms in his cues at Mission Dolores. He draws the church modes into his harmonies, employing sighing motifs, and using a pipe organ.

Both references, which David Cooper calls “extraopus intertextuality,”[1] remain at some distance from their antecedents. They are not literal. No one dances a real habanera during a café floor show. Scottie doesn’t pass an organist on his way to the graveyard. By remaining abstract, these references allow one’s imagination to play at a less conscious level, and with profoundly ironic implications.

Reblogged from Grace Brethren Church of Chico:

Reblogged from Grace Brethren Church of Chico:

The iGod and the Real God
Nehemiah 1
Matthew Raley (10-14-12)

Many Christians think of their relationship this way: In the Bible, God talks to us.  There we get his side of things.  In prayer, we talk to God and tell him our side of things.  Although this is not altogether wrong, it's not close enough to the alternative fulfillment of Christianity which we have been exploring in this series.

Read more… 162 more words

I’ve given several examples of Alfred Hitchcock’s abstract visuals in Vertigo (here and here). But Hitchcock also created a sound-world to match, and he found a collaborator in Bernard Herrmann. Together, they raised the score to the level of co-narrator with the camera.

The term “Wagnerian” is often used to characterize Herrmann’s score for Vertigo, and for good reason. But the variety of composers who influenced Herrmann hints at a more complex musical imagination.

He was famous for loving English composers such as Edward Elgar[1] and Ralph Vaughan Williams.[2] Vertigo’s frequent similarity to music by Claude Debussy is mentioned by critics.[3] Less well-known is Herrmann’s study as a thirteen-year-old of Hector Berlioz’s Treatise on Orchestration. The influence this Romantic maverick had on Herrmann was life-long.[4] Nor was Berlioz the only musical outsider with whom Herrmann identified. Though Herrmann spent his student years in New York close to such American icons as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, Herrmann also developed relationships with young radical composers in a group modeled on Les Six.

Most significantly, Steven Smith documents Herrmann’s long association with Charles Ives, the ultimate outsider, noting Herrmann’s early study of Ives’s 114 Songs and his habitual visits with Ives until Ives died in 1954.[5]

Reblogged from Grace Brethren Church of Chico:

The iGod and the Real God
Nehemiah 8:1-12
Matthew Raley (10-7-12)

In this series thus far we've learned three key lessons. First, the alternative fulfillment taught by Christianity, rather than being an escape from your world, is a deeper engagement with it. Second, this engagement is rooted in disposing of our iGods and worshiping the real God.  Third, this worship involves a unified, communal, emotional response to the real God.

Read more… 89 more words

The name “Jesus” has been a blank screen in America for a long time. If I embrace the name, I acknowledge that “Jesus” is the epitome of goodness. But, in a neat trick, I can project onto the name whatever righteous shape I hold dear.

Evangelicals, among whom I count myself, are some of the most skilled projectionists, and many people are now wary of our “Jesus.”

We evangelicals are quick to deplore the progressive “Jesus” who thought up socialism before there was even a proletariat, or the Buddhist “Jesus” who did a semester in India. We rejected the self-doubting “Jesus” of “Godspell,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” molded to match faddish ideals of personal authenticity. More recently, we’ve inveighed against the gnostic “Jesus” who had a child with Mary Magdalene — a savior for conspiracy theorists.

Our culture only accepts gods it has re-imagined in its own image. We’re right to dismiss all these Jesus-projections. But we can’t seem to reject the blank screen itself. We’ve profited too heavily from it. If we were to set the bar at intellectual honesty, we’d undermine our salesmanship.

For the last forty years at least the evangelical “Jesus” has looked as close to the American consumer as possible. Consider the Jesus-projection you are most likely to watch in an evangelical church.

In appearance, he is an Anglo-German woodsman with great hair. In attitude, he’s way non-threatening. In manner, he uses open gestures. He doesn’t lecture or argue. He uses sports analogies when talking to men and tear-jerking stories with women. He says, “Dude!”

This “Jesus” can be narrated like a sitcom in 18 minutes (minus commercials). Each week, the live studio audience laughs at the right times, but there comes a moment when they feel really bad for “Jesus,” maybe shed a tear. They realize how nice “Jesus” is to us, and how mean we are to him, and this hushed epiphany motivates them to try harder at being positive.

The Jesus of the New Testament is nothing like this.

The real Jesus is ancient. He cannot be understood, much less received, without a basic knowledge of his culture and history, and that is why pastors used to think of themselves as teachers. Many Christians see that Jesus is not the Now Guy evangelicals project, and the good news for them is that he can still be known. We know him through the ancient method by which our minds labor in the Bible’s words and in prayer, interacting with the real one who rose from the dead.

Furthermore, the real Jesus had a message about the outworking of history. He did not give inspirational chats about living positively, like some huckster from Houston. The classic distillation of his teaching is, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” God is driving events toward his goals, and those events can sweep an individual away no matter how positively she thinks. That word repent is almost illegal in churches today, probably because it contains the one message contemporary people can’t abide: “God’s plan isn’t all about you.”

But there is more good news for the people who already know this. Though the projection of the hyper-compassionate woodsman who is on call for you 24/7 is bowlderized, there is still the real Jesus. He is our Sovereign, whose power has swept us into his plan. The injustice and violence of our world will dissolve in the heat of his stare, and the new city we hope for will be built.

Ultimately, the real Jesus defied those in his own time who wanted to use him as a blank screen. Many people followed Jesus, John reports, but had agendas for him to fulfill. Jesus “did not entrust himself to them.” (John 2.24) When many wanted him to overthrow the Romans, for example, “Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” (John 6.15)

So there is still more good news. In the swirl of efforts to re-imagine Jesus after our likeness, the real Savior has a mind of his own. And he’s still commanding, “Follow me.”

Abstraction in art is any step away from a thing-in-itself. Artists use abstraction to open emotional and reflective space in their work — space that isn’t there at the literal level. As I wrote in my last post, there is a range of abstraction levels in every work of art, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo is especially full of examples.

I’ve shown several examples of how Hitchcock took steps away from concrete referents like characters inside the film and even artworks outside of it. Here are some instances of higher visual abstraction, in which the referents are less concrete.

The first sequence ending with a dead policeman.

The view from the tower where Madeleine and Judy die.

A quite high level of abstraction is the reference of the film back upon itself. This is not merely the foreshadowing of an event early and the event’s later completion, but the recurrence of entire sequences of action, like the pursuits that end with Scottie witnessing a fatal plunge. Deborah Linderman, for example, acknowledging her dependence on Raymond Bellour, reads Vertigo as “a series of self-reflecting mirrors,” describing a displacement of stasis that recurs all the way to the final shot.[1] Peter Wollen uses similar terms to describe the plot.[2]

The motif of red and green that permeates the film does not represent a literal thing in the story; the colors influence the emotional atmosphere while maintaining visual coherence. The drab greens and reds in the hallway leading to Judy’s hotel room can be seedy, while the red and green theme at Ernie’s can communicate opulence. The artificially limited palette retains a broad range of impacts.

Another example of this level of abstraction would be the famous spiral motif in the opening titles. Spiral references occur in Scottie’s nightmare, in the mission tower staircase, and even in Madeleine’s hair. While the spiral does represent the physical condition of vertigo, in a sense, there is no suggestion that the condition actually looks like a spiral, either to the onlooker or to the sufferer. On the contrary, the literal imitation of vertigo is Hitchcock’s famous point-of-view shot in which the camera zooms in and tracks back at the same time.